


The Grass is Dead, the Gold is Brown

by Anonymous



Series: Return to Oz [1]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: (in the past/with other people), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bisexual Quentin Coldwater, Gay Character, Implied/Referenced Dubious Consent, Intricate Rituals, M/M, Men Crying, POV Eliot Waugh, Pining, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Yearning, heart eyes motherfucker, mentions of Fen/Eliot, mentions of Mike/Eliot, mentions of Quentin/Alice, mentions of Quentin/Margo/Eliot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2020-05-13
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:01:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24170977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: This is just because I desperately wanted Eliot and Quentin to get a private moment on the gang's return to Fillory at the end of s2e2, given the intimacy of their private goodbye previously.
Relationships: Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Series: Return to Oz [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1748788
Comments: 18
Kudos: 96
Collections: Anonymous





	The Grass is Dead, the Gold is Brown

**Author's Note:**

> OKAY. So. I've worked out the exact path of the canon divergence that makes my 'I just want to see it' moments work, and then I realized I am too lazy/busy with other things to write it ALL out in fic form because all I care about is writing their scenes together.
> 
> So the short version is, Quentin DOESN'T try to get back with Alice, doesn't get distracted by making out with or overthinking Alice, actually fucking remembers what Julia said to him, no one goes crazy, saving everyone both time and cacodemons, everything works out reasonably well enough, and this is shamelessly all so that I can write nothing but scenes of Eliot and Quentin having a tortured flirtation in Fillory. I mean and I guess everyone else's life is also better, but I'ma be honest, this is all an excuse for courtly love and Emotions.

Eliot holds Quentin back, after the general catch-up, for a moment alone before serious battle plans can be enacted. Which is perhaps more than a little selfish, they all only have so much time, but…

But he’s missed him.

All of them, obviously, and he and Margo are going to need some serious private catch-up, but he doesn’t have the _time_ to start with Margo now, and he thinks he and Quentin don’t need _quite_ so much time, just… just half a moment. And he thinks she understands, because when he waves her on, she takes the others out of the room while Quentin is still caught up in his amusement over Eliot’s tales of woe regarding introducing actual farmwork to Fillory.

“Oh, you think this is funny, city boy?” He prods at Quentin’s shoulder, grinning in spite of himself just at the sight of him. At not being lost from him, at not even losing too much time with him-- them. With all of them.

Quentin laughs. “Sorry, did you just call me ‘city boy’? Like you’re not.”

“I’m really not.”

“Yeah, spending summers on some estate somewhere doesn’t count.”

Eliot almost doesn’t say. He doesn’t have to. He could just laugh it off, like he laughs it off every time, he could pretend, the way he always pretends. And Quentin wouldn’t have to know, and he wouldn’t…

He wouldn’t look at him differently. With a sort of disappointment-- because how could he look at him any other way but with a sort of disappointment? Oh, not a vast disappointment, because he’s sweet and not at all shallow, and he’s _loyal_. Before everything else, he is that. But a little of the magic would be gone, pardoning the turn of phrase… a little of his… je ne sais quoi. He wouldn’t be so fascinating, he’d just be…

Him.

But if he doesn’t say it, then...

“Well, I didn’t spend summers on some estate somewhere. I spent summers _working_. On a-- ugh, I’ll just say it-- _farm_.”

“What, really?” Quentin cocks his head to one side, little enigmatic smile in place. No mockery, just… something. “ _You_?”

“I’m just full of surprises.”

“Yeah. I guess you are. So… so you really _know_ this stuff?”

“I _did_ have to teach your beloved fantasyland what fucking agriculture is, after all. Did you really think I read about that in books? But now that you’re back, if our subjects need any more hands-on help learning this shit, you’re doing the gross parts, I’m not putting my hands in dirt ever again.” He shrugs. “And the less said about fertilizer, the better.” 

“Sure. I don’t mind doing the gross parts, if it’s to save our subjects.” He laughs again, and comes around to stand at Eliot’s side, to bump his shoulder gently into Eliot’s arm. “I just thought it was common knowledge stuff, that you… I don’t know. It’s hard to picture you doing this. Even knowing you grew up on a farm.”

“Please _don’t_ picture it, _gross_. Anyway, I don’t… think about that part of my past, if I can help it. The way it... _smelled_. To this day I get violently ill if I hear any song that mentions a tractor, that’s only slightly a lie. I made great sacrifices for this incredibly stupid place you so adore.”

“Okay, well… what did you _choose_ to do, then? You didn’t choose to spend your summers working on a farm, but you must have had some time to yourself, you must have… done things for you. What were they?”

It’s not the question he’d expected. He’d thought… maybe Quentin would thank him, because he can be so fucking earnest. Or maybe he would laugh it off because he knows Eliot can be _extra_ about things. Or maybe he would pout because Eliot had called Fillory incredibly stupid, and for all its faults it is his precious thing. He’d been prepared for all those things and how to react-- to brush off something too sweet or to laugh with him or to coax him out of a sulk by offering to show him some newly discovered piece of Fillory, knowing he would be too enamored to hold onto any hard feelings. But he had not been prepared for that.

“Summers and weekends and mornings and afternoons, but mostly summers. I spent my free time in the attic.” He smiles, though it’s barely a smile. There’s still nothing very glamorous about any part of his real past. And yet… Quentin had asked. Eliot finds he wants to answer. “With my grandmother’s antique sewing machine. Making my own clothes.”

“That’s so cool.” Quentin says, says it with a wondering laugh, like he means it. Like he’s delighted by it.

“Is it?”

“Yeah. There’s-- Okay, I guess ‘cool’ means very little coming from me, you know what I did with my free time and the gaps you’re filling in with whatever else you might imagine I was like are probably not super inaccurate. I wasn’t cool. But yeah. I mean, being holed up in an attic with an antique sewing machine is… romantic. In the-- the literary sense.”

“You would think that.” But his smile doubles at that. “You must have a very romantic picture in mind of me working my poor little fingers to the bone up in my drafty garret.”

“Not quite.” He tilts a grin up at Eliot, arms folded around himself. “But I guess… something a little bit like that. A little bit.”

“I mean I make it sound a little grander than it was, I was mostly tailoring thrift store finds, not much working from whole cloth. The patterns and the draping, it’s all… complicated.” He waves a hand. “When you’re teaching yourself everything. Also I had a TV up there so it’s not very Victorian foundling of me. I mean it was a pretty crappy TV but it had a built in VCR. I know that spoils the illusion.”

“I think that’s pretty impressive. The teaching yourself everything, not the crappy TV with the built in VCR.”

“The tapes I wore out…” Eliot sighs. 

“Dirty Dancing was among them?”

“A lot of dance movies. And… a lot of memorizing monologues, practicing being different leading men, figuring out what was the most ‘me’. So that I could be someone else. Ferris Bueller, I was Ferris Bueller a lot. I can still do Roy Batty. On the Waterfront… Well, not just leading men. I think I used to do a Sally Field… I know I did Scarlett O’Hara. And Glenn Close, in Dangerous Liaisons. Oh, I did the, the ‘no more wire hangers’. I mean I just put on the same movies over and over, sometimes just the best scenes, and I played every part, and I sewed. And… and then I found this-- this old miniseries, Brideshead Revisited, with Anthony Andrews?”

“I can see that one.” Quentin says, startles him just a little from his reminiscing-- he’s not wrong, it was something consciously channelled, he’s just not used to someone spotting the threads. “I mean I saw the, you know, a while back the Ben Whishaw film version? But the first time I saw you, you kind of had a vibe. Maybe it was the outfit you were wearing, but-- Brideshead Revisited. Kind of floated to mind, with you. If you hadn’t introduced yourself, you would have been _that Sebastian Flyte motherfucker_.”

Eliot turns, and he finds himself suddenly struck. 

Well, maybe not suddenly. It’s certainly not the first time. It’s further from the first time than he’s comfortable admitting, not that he’d even admit this time out loud. 

He’s struck, and it feels sudden every time it happens, and he knows better than to fall for it. Struck by the sad doe eyes and the little smile, and the way he sparkles. Struck by his sincerity and his certainty. Struck by a memory that never forgets-- a series of them. Their first meeting, and so many encounters since, catching his flustered blushing or bright smiles, listening to his bickering and sniping or to his boundless enthusiasm, learning how much strength and comfort could be found in the circle of his arms… 

But not like that. He’s just been a fool, since-- he likes to think not since the start, that would be… sad. But… it didn’t take much. They have history, but it’s not a history of deliberate choices and mutual feeling, more a history of… a history of looks and jokes and half-regretted mistakes, and the kind of questions that keep a man up at night wondering about how it might have been in another life, whether it was ever different in any other lives, whether there was ever a good one where he never made a mistake. Or where his mistakes all paid off. Or where his mistakes were just choices and his choices weren’t wrong. He wonders if there’s ever, in any splinter of the universe, been a version of himself that isn’t or wasn’t a monumental fuckup. 

“What?” Quentin asks, looks up at him with that little quirk of a smile, with a light dancing in his eyes. 

Oh, shit, has this all been happening in real time? Has he just been standing here _gazing_ at the man?

“Nothing. I just… I don’t-- Aside from Margo, from whom I hold no secrets, I guess the only people I’ve really told about my-- I haven’t really told… I mean I managed to not have to admit everything to you all, when I was talking about Fillory’s agrarian revolution. I told Fen, since it seemed relevant. And I told Mike, or-- who I thought… Sorry.” He waves a hand. “I don’t talk about it.”

“So it means something, that you told me.” He nods, and then his hand is wrapping itself warm around Eliot’s elbow. “Well thank you.”

“Can we make this about something embarrassing about you?”

“There is nothing embarrassing about me that you don’t already know.”

“Oh, I’m sure there’s something. When did you lose your virginity?”

“I was twenty and it was not good for anyone.” He says, with no hesitation. “You?”

“Giving? I think sixteen. He wouldn’t speak to me in public. Getting? Nineteen… almost twenty. It took me a little while to-- You’d think as soon as I was in college, I’d be-- but it took me some time to shake off some things.”

“Wait, giving and getting are two different things? I might have to change my answer--”

“It counts, it counts. If both parties are naked and the touching is mutual, it counts even if it’s bad. God, you’re painfully straight.”

“You know I’m not.” He folds his arms back around himself, glances off to the side, smile small and self-conscious. “Just because I don’t have a whole lot of experience with the… guy side.”

“Oh. Right.”

“You were there for my first time with a guy, before you ask.”

“You were there for my first time with a girl. If that’s… if that means anything.” Eliot’s mouth feels dry, his head feels light. “I don’t even really remember how much she and I… interacted. Enough, I guess. I remember-- I don’t remember much.”

“No, neither do I. Flashes. I probably shouldn’t have… brought that up.”

“It’s fine. We… we got past it. Still friends. The parts I remember…” He trails off, aware they’ve sailed into dangerous territory. And yet it isn’t like it was, it isn’t brittle or raw. They can joke about it-- so long as he never tells Quentin that he thinks about the parts he remembers still. Perhaps a little too fondly and perhaps specifically in order to perform for his bride. That’s the kind of thing that makes a friendship awkward.

“Are so bad you thought I was straight?”

“You weren’t-- neither of us was… I wasn’t your _choice_. Just something that happened. A regret.”

“Circumstances weren’t ideal.” Quentin allows. 

“And then you were mad at me, and I-- God.” Eliot scrubs a hand over his face. “I was just waiting for it, you know? To hear I took advantage of you, like I was--”

“Shit, no. I mean I was, yeah, I was mad, but you weren’t-- I just hated that you guys couldn’t take anything seriously and I just torpedoed my relationship and I felt like it was a joke to you, but I would never--”

“Because I’ve gotten that shit from guys I didn’t even have sex with, you know? Like you put an arm around someone’s shoulders because you’re at a party telling a story and he’s next to you, and he makes it weird, or you’re out with… like, a _group_ of people, and you’re having a good time, and you’re not even _trying_ anything, but obviously because you’re gay, if you so much as smile at some fragile heterosexual, you’re ‘preying’ on him--”

“It wasn’t like that with us. I know it wasn’t like that.”

“I mean I know I flirt. And I don’t say a whole lot of no when someone is receptive, but I--”

“I know _you’re_ not like that.” Quentin grabs him, both shoulders.

“My last relationship was with a man who didn’t even _know_ me, he wasn’t in control of his body for a single second of the time we-- There was a real person who did not know he was having sex with me, and I’ll never know if the real Mike was even-- He didn’t _know_ \-- which means he didn’t--”

“You couldn’t have known that.” He draws Eliot back into his arms, just as reassuringly solid as when they’d said goodbye. “The fact that he spent your whole relationship possessed by an evil entity bent on our destruction makes you very much also a victim in this.”

“Well.” Eliot sniffs, burrowing into Quentin’s shoulder. “Maybe I’m paying for it now.”

“Paying…?”

“My marriage. My unbreakable, no-wiggle-room marriage. To a woman. It would almost be easier if I hated her, but I really like her, I just… I mean I’m _capable_ , but I’m not-- it isn’t me. And when I’m with her I have to think very hard about someone else, and I can never be with-- I just…”

“Oh.” Quentin’s voice is soft, he rubs at Eliot’s back. “When you went through with it, I guess I kind of assumed-- I mean between that and the three-way--”

“That I was bisexual?”

“A little bit bisexual, yeah.”

“Well, I’m not.”

_“This is your very last chance at me, you know.” Eliot joked, his hands resting in Quentin’s. “Once I’m a married man, apparently I’ll be literally incapable of any infidelity. Which will be a great loss to every world, I know, but needs must.”_

_“We’re literally at your wedding, I think it’s already too late.” Quentin laughed, and his eyes shone by torchlight and starlight alike, by the inconstant moon._

_“Mm, probably. I’m sorry… I mean, not-- I mean obviously you’re not clamoring to get your hands on all_ this _again, I just mean… this should have been your destiny, not mine. This is the thing you love. The place you know. But I want you to know I’ll take good care of it for you. I really will.”_

_“Eliot… thank you. I know you will.”_

_“I know I haven’t always been the picture of responsibility--”_

_“You are going to rise to the occasion. It’s what you do. And I know I wanted this to be my destiny, but… I think this is right. You have the bearing of a high king.”_

_“Do I now?” They were still holding hands, he was so aware of the fact that they were still holding hands, that Quentin’s were warm._

_“I’d have believed you were the high king of something the moment we met.”_

_“Oh, Q…” He shook his head, and tried to inject some levity into his tone. “You can’t say these things to me now that I am promised to another, you_ rake _, you. I mean, now that it really is too late to seduce the groom.”_

_Quentin just laughed again and ducked his head, and released Eliot’s hands with a final squeeze, but Eliot carried the warmth of them even as they parted. He felt the echo of Quentin’s hold on him even as he prepared himself to be married._

_It was maybe a bad sign._

“You’re just full of surprises.” Quentin whispers, voice thick with emotions Eliot does not dare contemplate. 

He wants to say something glib, something clever. What comes out is a sob.

“Pretend that didn’t just happen.” He orders.

“What I mean is, you keep-- astounding me.”

“You’re not making this easier, you know.”

“Making what easier?”

“Letting go.” He takes a deep breath. “And I know we have shit to do. But I missed you most of all, Scarecrow.”

“Liar.” Quentin laughs, but it sounds gratifyingly near tears, and he presses in close cheek to cheek. “You missed Margo most.”

“Margo doesn’t count, she’s my other half, it’s… different.” Eliot sweeps a hand up and down Quentin’s back, pulls away with some reluctance. “Anyway, I have something for you.”

“Gimme.” He smiles, easy, holds a hand out, but Eliot shakes his head, retrieves Quentin’s crown and holds it up. 

“I’d like to do this right.”

“Oh, you don’t think your other half did a good job?”

“I’ll deny it to my grave if you ever tell her I intimated as much. But… I would like to do it.”

“Do I kneel, or--”

“No, you’re fun sized, I can manage.” He smirks. This is easy, he can keep his cool through some teasing. All he has to do is blink back the tears, get into a groove with the banter, and pretend he does not have complicated emotions surrounding one Quentin Coldwater.

He’s just… this is just a secret private re-coronation ceremony, which is completely platonic and a normal gesture between kings. And if he reaches up first to brush the hair back from Quentin’s face, well… that’s just so it won’t be trapped hanging down in front of his eyes once the crown is in place. 

“See, and here I thought I might have a dignified coronation this time around…” Quentin fires back, but-- _oh_ , but he leans in, but his lashes flutter, but it can’t be only in Eliot’s imagination. He would have written it off as pure wishful thinking, and maybe it still is, but the possibility…

The possibility doesn’t matter. He has a duty, which means whatever might have come to pass between them can’t. He’ll watch Quentin love someone else. He’ll learn how to keep from acknowledging the spark that flares up between them. 

He will be happy, so long as they both survive and slay the Beast, so long as Quentin rules at his side in this capacity… so long as he is allowed to spend every day watching him find some kind of joy and beauty in this place, and surely if they save it… won’t he? Things won’t be what Eliot most wants, but things can still be good. And maybe his heart will get the picture and move on from being hung up on Coldwater of all people.

“King Quentin.” Eliot places the crown. “The Stalwart. That is, if-- if you’d prefer?”

“I’m not sure we can change it.” He smiles, and his eyes are shining, and maybe they’re both just trying for some impossible cool and maybe they’re both doomed to fail. “But it’s nice.”

“Well, we’ll work on it.” His hand slips down to caress Quentin’s cheek, his jaw. Dangerously close to something, but the something it’s dangerously close to isn’t any boundary of Quentin’s. Quentin, who continues to gaze up at him like he’s the moon and the stars, who doesn’t protest the hand on his face. “It’s what I would have-- if it was me. And if I… had it in my power to-- Maybe things are… for the best as they are, but it’s-- it suits you.”

“Thank you.” Quentin’s hand wraps around his wrist, gentle. He still doesn’t break away, break eye contact. He worries at his lower lip with his teeth, because life’s not fair, and why shouldn’t he be the most kissable-looking thing in two worlds now, when Eliot couldn’t possibly? “Maybe that one’s just between us?”

“Oh, if I wasn’t a married man, there are so many things I’d dub you, just between us.” Eliot pulls away with a wink, with his best attempt at a grin. “I might even ask you to kneel after all. But! Duty calls.” He spreads his hands.

“Eliot…”

Eliot shakes his head. “We don’t have much time. I’ve wasted too much of it. But I needed to. After sitting here waiting, feeling useless while the rest of you all got to work on solutions, I-- I just needed to. To see you.” He bites his own lip, not sure if he’s willing Quentin to understand, or to very much not.

“I still think about it, too.” Quentin blurts out. “That night. What I remember.”

“Q…” And there goes a tear, he can feel it make its progress down his cheek. 

“Sorry. But I do.”

“If I’d known I could have you once, but only once… I like to think I’d have done it differently. But… I guess it is what it is.”

“How-- how would you have?” Quentin asks, his chest jerking with the sudden sharp intake of breath. His eyes… his eyes wide, and wet. “Sorry, no-- don’t tell me.”

Eliot imagines it, as he’s imagined it often enough. How he would take Quentin in his arms and draw him close, kiss him smooth and slow… lay him out in the center of his bed and take his time, really worship every inch of his body the way he didn’t, he didn’t have the mindset to, he didn’t… he didn’t take enough time. The desperation to feel something _good_ over the clamor of emotion drove him, and he couldn’t do it the way Quentin deserved-- well, if he’d been thinking straight, he supposes he wouldn’t have done it at all.

_Eliot had wanted to kill his emotions, and he’d started by doing it the old-fashioned way, and no one had stopped him. But using magic? Using magic was better._

_So much was clear when he wasn’t suffering from the grief and the pain and the guilt, over Mike. Mike, who was really something horrible which had preyed on him and which would have killed his friends… who never really loved him, because he was a monster, and he was using the body of a man who didn’t even know Eliot from Adam, which made Eliot-- Eliot, who had sex with him and who killed him-- a monster as well._

_Without the crushing weight of his emotions, though, he could see it all. Mike had seemed perfect because he was calculated to be, because somehow the Beast already knew how to get to him, what he would want. A true academic, interested in the pursuit of magic, excited to join his and Margo’s efforts just to see what he might learn from it-- and, of course, to spend the time flirting with Eliot, that was some of the draw. Someone down to earth, but who could still appreciate Eliot in all his Eliot-ness-- who wasn’t afraid to admit to who he was, who wasn’t afraid to be overshadowed by Eliot’s peacocking, his theatricality, who wasn’t afraid of_ Eliot _\-- who didn’t think of him as too high maintenance just because he was showy, who he could just be himself with. A man he could be his_ whole _self with, the self he had built and the vulnerable, broken self he’d built himself around. Someone who invited him to spill his secrets. Someone who appreciated all the spectacular things that he was, even though he himself was a quieter type of man, even though he didn’t fully understand all the things Eliot cared about._

_Freed from any emotion over the thing, Eliot could see how readily so many of the things he had liked about Mike could apply to Quentin. Quentin, who would have let himself be pulled into anything that Eliot and Margo were working on, just to get to learn something new. Quentin, who was… pretty, and sweet, and who was never offended by a little flirtation, though he hadn’t realized then that he might rise to it in earnest. He should have-- Quentin is nothing if not earnest. Quentin, who appreciated Eliot as he was, and appreciated the things that he did and knew, even if he himself had zero understanding of fashion, even if he himself preferred to be in someone’s shadow much of the time. Quentin, who he had not known long before he felt as if he could tell him almost anything, certainly they had not known each other long before Eliot was telling him about one of the worst formative moments in his life as a magician._

_Freed from any emotion, Eliot could see that he had had some burgeoning feeling for Quentin, something a little deeper than the playful but meaningless flirtation he played at. Something it had been easy to sublimate onto Mike, because Mike was available, because he’d thought Quentin was straight. Because Quentin and Alice had seemed a foregone conclusion… Even freed from any emotion, he found he did not think they were a good match. It was difficult to articulate to himself, the ways in which they didn’t quite fit, but at least he could reassure himself with the knowledge that it was not an emotional response, it was just one of those things, just seeing two people try to jam the jigsaw puzzle pieces of their personalities together and not quite interlock. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Eliot lacked the distance to know if he would be objectively any better._

_When all the feelings slammed back into him, he was no longer drowning in grief alone, he was also high on those feelings, and it didn’t help matters that Quentin was so close at hand, so sweet and so needy. It could have been perfect, in another life… instead of the mess it was. If it wasn’t for all the complicating factors, if it wasn’t for the way emotion took the reins, it could have been. He could tell even through the chokehold that emotion had on both of them, even with Margo in the mix, how good a match they could have been. How eager Quentin was to give up control and how he blossomed beneath attention, and how…_

_Except, of course, that in the cold light of day, they’d had to face the realization that they’d ruined everything. He still hadn’t been able to trust that Quentin wasn’t straight, had had to push his feelings about being an experiment into the lineup of negative emotions, in there with grief and guilt once more at the forefront. Agony, because none of it was prioritized or healed over, when it all came back, and after that blush of love and closeness and joy wore off, it was all…_

_Rejection, betrayal, what it is to be hated, how it felt before he built up all his walls. Things that wouldn’t sting him to experience again now, he suddenly felt like new from every point in his life. The feeling of having killed a boy he hated accidentally and the feeling of having killed a boy he loved on purpose. It all flooded back to him with no sense of scale that morning, and with it, the consequences of his actions, and Quentin’s anger, disgust…_

“No, we’d… better not.” He agrees. But he would give Quentin everything he ever wanted, if only he could have a second chance.

A thing he doesn’t get, unless a girl he thinks is perfectly nice _dies_ , before Quentin can find something better. So… not something he can really hope for.

“We should probably catch up with the others.” Quentin nods. “Wait, will they wonder why I’m wearing my crown?”

“You? No.” Eliot smiles. “You’re perfect.”


End file.
